Cedarsmoke: Into The WIld World | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- Jon Cloumassis and Co. are finally saying goodbye to youth and braving the great big adventure that is adulthood on Cedarsmoke’s debut full-length. Or at least they’re drawing some kind of arbitrary divider through their mid-to-late 20s, which, from Hendrix to Cobain is traditionally a dangerous time for rockers. Still indulging their manic habit for surging, bittersweet rock wedded to suicidally depressing lyrics, I can only hope that those two competing emotional arcs find some kind of uneasy balance, sending them all stumbling Into The Wild World.

Right from the beginning there’s a darkness encroaching on just about everything. Opener We Settle Into The Night looks out on the whole of that Wild World and finds little to like. In all of the history and famous faces, consumer culture and relationships, existential philosophy and far-away places, every single thing blends into the same miasma that’s sapping Cloumassis’ will to live as he sings: “It’s a quarter life crisis on the western front / I even gave up on giving up / Getting sober and getting drunk / Found a job, enrolled in the working class/ Watched my soul depreciate faster than a brand new car.” This kind of slightly more erudite version of The Hold Steady is very familiar from Cedarsmoke’s previous work. The band revel in the tatterdemalion grandeur of how awful everything is and thank god the music’s sweet, because there’s got to be something to stop you doing yourself in.

The scope seems to shrink as Cloumassis glares both backwards and forwards in his life, on a single like Being Young Is Getting Old. There’s no solace in nostalgia because “...for me those were never halcyon days” and the future is grim enough that  he wishes it away: “Ready or not, time is wasting / I wish it would hurry up.” Honestly, sometimes Wild World could go toe-to-toe with The Smiths at their bleakest.

It’s for the best, then, that there’s a surprising streak of tenderness that occasionally breaks through the dark, emotional stranglehold. It appears completely unalloyed on another early single, Anything, with an almost unbelievable, breathless quality. Cloumassis proclaims wildly: “Holy cow, I’m over the moon / I’ll be the dish; you can be the spoon / Let’s abscond and fake our deaths… I would do anything for you.” It’s funny, romance is pretty stock standard stuff for a rock record, but here, maybe just by contrast, it corruscates like a bolt of lightning. Of course it wouldn’t be Cedarsmoke if everything didn’t crash and burn immediately, on the very next track. “I spent eternity in your bedroom / Now you cast me out, that’s your purview” sings Cloumassis on the number appropriately titled The Bitter End.

Helping along the rich, heartland rock are some guest artistic contributors in the form of Maddie Keinonen of Dumb Things adding sweet backing vocals and producer Cam Smith also of bands like Tape/Off and Terra Pines, who seems not to have been able to restrain himself from leaping out from behind the boards to stroke the synth here or smack out a drum-line there. It always feels like The Boss is looking over your shoulder when you do this kind of Americana, but listening to Into The Wild World and the rich enthusiasm of everyone's efforts, I think he would approve.

Are baleful glares at a hostile world, a tempestuous love story and some sweet licks a recipe for living? Who can say? On the one hand, the colour of darkness that suffuses Cedarsmoke’s lyrics can make it difficult to see whether there’s any future at all. When you hear someone talking how they’ve been dreaming of Sylvia Plath and an assisted suicide you should probably ask 'are you okay?' Right? On the other hand, I often wonder how to characterise what music really does for people: it seems so important yet so difficult to nail down. In their extremity, Cedarsmoke may provide a really clear example. As we’re thrust into life, completely unprepared for its constant tribulations, singing out our bitter regrets may be the surest way to purge them, to give us the strength to continue on down the line, Into The Wild World.

- Chris Cobcroft.